Why $1 trillion milestone changes the way Apple is valued

How high can Apple’s market value go? Less than a week after it became the first company to hit the $1 trillion mark, venture capitalist Gene Munster predicts that Apple’s value will continue to climb.

What makes Apple unique to investors, Munster said, is how its hardware seems to work as a subscription business. Many iPhone users, for example, upgrade to a newer handset every two or three years.

This has created a “paradigm shift in how investors view the tech giant, he said in an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Alley this morning.

“We’re referring to it as Apple as a service, and that’s not reflecting their service segment,” said Munster, who heads Loup Ventures. “This is a concept that the hardware is actually performing like a subscription. If in fact that is the case, I think that the multiple on Apple will go up.”

In July, Munster said he has been telling investors FAANG stocks (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) as a whole are not a safe bet. “Specifically, companies like Netflix and Facebook are going to kind of fall off,” he said a day after Facebook’s historic market plunge.

He did, however, say “outperformance” in tech stocks will be driven by the continued growth of Apple, Google and Amazon.